The Essay A Novel (18 page)

“G'morning, Miss Singletary.” I dipped my head, avoiding the familiar brown eyes that were staring at me in the rearview mirror, while trying to conceal my grin. “Morning, Coach.”

“Good morning. How's the groin?”

Earlier in the week he had asked me at practice why I was so gimpy and I told him I pulled a groin muscle. “Okay. Good. It feels a lot better.”

“Did you ice it when you got home last night?”

I had not. “Yes, sir. For twenty minutes. Just like you said.”

“Are you lying to me?”

“Yes, sir. I forgot, actually, but it's feeling a lot better today, anyway. Really.”

He closed his eyes for a moment and shook his head. “Jimmy Lee, it's not common knowledge that Miss Singletary and I are seeing each other and we would prefer to keep it that way, so it would be in everyone's best interests if you could just keep this to yourself.”

“Yes, sir. I'm sure we can work something out.”

His brows arched. “Work something out?”

“You know, I've been wanting to play a little fullback.”

He laughed. “We'll see.”

I couldn't stop grinning. “How about quarterback? I've always wanted to be the quarterback.”

“I'd say now's a good time to quit pressing your luck.”

“Yes, sir.”

There had been rumors floating around the school for a year that Coach Battershell and Miss Singletary had been dating. “An item,” they were often called in hushed tones. Someone—that nebulous “someone”—supposedly saw them together at a movie in Chillicothe and the news spread quickly around East Vinton High School. They maintained a professional appearance at school and you hardly ever saw them talking to each other. Still, it didn't surprise me that the rumors were true, though that morning it amused me greatly to see them together. There were no two people I admired more than Coach Battershell and Miss Singletary, and I thought they made a handsome couple.

The sun broke through the gray of October Ohio and began warming the valleys and dells of Vinton County. Boughs of oak and maple, soaked from the night's rain, hung over the edge of the asphalt back roads that snaked away from Red Dog Road. The ditches along the roads ran in brown torrents with tiny whitecaps lapping at the gravel berm. The saturated earth was dank after the rain, and the musty smell of decaying vegetation seeped into the wind as it sliced into the back seat from the passenger side window, which was rolled down a few inches. The air was wet and heavy from the rain, and the windshield wipers squeaked as they slapped away the morning mist.

Following my dad's visit to her classroom, Miss Singletary selected Saturday morning as our time to go clothes shopping. She had also decided that our sojourn would include a visit to the campus of Ohio University in Athens. It was, I knew, the initial step in the process. And in the world of James Leland Hickam, it was a giant step. I was simultaneously excited and terrified. For nearly eighteen years, I had been stuck in the rut that was Red Dog Road. No one had ever talked to me about going to college, or being a doctor, or a football player, or a writer. It wasn't my parents' fault; it was beyond their poor abilities to imagine such successes, too. Prior to winning the essay competition, my loftiest goal was to simply complete high school, something no Hickam male had ever managed. Afterward, maybe I could get a good job at a steel mill in Steubenville or at the glass works in Wheeling or the shoe factory in Portsmouth. That seemed achievable—a good factory job and a house far from the dust and stench of Red Dog Road was all I wanted.

Until Miss Singletary had talked to me about my hygiene, I didn't know enough to use deodorant. Now she and Coach Battershell were taking me to visit a college campus. It seemed like too giant a leap. I was standing at the open door of the plane, my parachute strapped on, rip cord in hand, but I wasn't jumping. I knew that someone was going to have to put a foot on my ass and push me out of the plane.

We drove up Route 50 toward Athens and pulled into a Bob Evans Restaurant. “I need some of my money,” I told Miss Singletary.

“I think I can spring for breakfast,” Coach Battershell said.

We slipped into a corner booth. They ordered coffees. “Can I have chocolate milk?” I asked Miss Singletary.

“You're nearly grown up, Jimmy Lee. You can have whatever you want.”

“Chocolate milk,” I told the waitress.

They both took their napkins, unfolded them and set them on their laps. I did the same and watched as they arranged their utensils, following their lead. It was just another reminder of how much I didn't know. The waitress set our drinks on the table and took our orders. I asked for scrambled eggs and sausage links.

“Have you ever seen a college campus, Jimmy Lee?” Miss Singletary asked.

“We took an eighth-grade field trip to Rio Grande and I've been to Athens before. I've seen Ohio University, but I've never been there to look around.”

“Are you excited?”

I shrugged. “Kinda. A little nervous.”

“What's there to be nervous about?”

“Going to college probably wasn't such a big step for you, Miss Singletary. Your folks were both teachers and they went to college. I'll bet going to college wasn't even a question for you. Probably the day you were born it was a given that you'd go to college and you knew what to expect. My dad, Edgel, Virgil—none of them even finished high school. It seems like another world to me and I don't know if I'm ready. I don't want to fail.”

Coach Battershell said, “Jimmy Lee, everybody fails. Everybody! That's life. Do you want to know the secret to success?”

“Sure.”

“It's really no big secret. In life, at one point or another, everybody takes a punch right in the nose. It hurts, it bleeds, and it's embarrassing. When that happens, some people walk over to the bench, sit down, and watch the rest of their life from the sidelines. They're too afraid to get back in the game. They want to play, you understand, but they won't because they want to avoid another punch in the nose. That's why you see a lot of really smart, talented people sitting on the sidelines. But a successful person just wipes the blood off and gets back in the game, even though he knows that eventually he's going to get punched in the nose again. The difference is, he thinks the punch in the nose is worth the possibility of success. You can't win if you aren't in the game.”

“I hardly fit in at high school. If it weren't for football, I'd just be another dogger heading for the sawmill or the Farnsworths' junkyard or prison. How am I going to fit in at college? At least at East Vinton, there are other doggers. When I get to college, I'm going to look like the biggest hick on campus.”

Coach Battershell stopped stirring his coffee and set the spoon on the side of the saucer. “You need to understand something, Jimmy Lee. Once you go to college, you start with a clean slate.” He put his hand on the table and made a wiping motion. “Nobody knows who your family is or that your brother was in prison, or anything else. You'll be judged totally on what kind of a man you are. Once you get out of Vinton County, everything's even.”

I smiled because I didn't believe him. “That doesn't seem possible, Coach.”

“I'm telling you, if that's what you're worried about, then you're worrying over nothing.”

“Yeah, but you never had that problem. You were always the star.”

They looked at each other for a moment, neither revealing anything with their facial expressions. “You don't know that.”

“I've heard the stories. You were the star quarterback for the O.U. Bobcats. You set all those records. You were all-conference and the team's MVP. The guys on the team say your picture is everywhere in the football offices.”

“That's true, but it doesn't mean it came easy.”

“It sure looks like it did.”

He sipped his coffee and rolled the cup between his palms for several seconds. “Did you ever hear of a guy named Rex Battershell?”

“No.”

The conversation halted while the waitress set our breakfasts on the table. After she had warmed up their coffees and left, Coach said, “Rex “The Rocket” Battershell was an All-American quarterback at Pitt. They called him “The Rocket” because he could throw a football eighty yards in the air. He also was my dad. He played a couple of years in the pros with Washington and then went to law school. He was an assistant U.S. attorney for a while and then ran for sheriff of Summit County and won every election in a landslide because everyone wanted to vote for “The Rocket.” He was big, strong, handsome, great personality, a local boy who came back home to live after college and the pros. There wasn't a single person in the county who was better known than my dad. He was in the newspaper all the time—busting drug dealers, arresting murderers, visiting schools, taking turkeys to poor families at Thanksgiving. When I started playing football in high school, there was hardly ever a story in the paper that didn't say, ‘Kyle Battershell, son of former Pitt All-American Rex “The Rocket” Battershell.' That's who I was—Rex Battershell's kid. No matter what I did or how well I did it, I couldn't get out from under his shadow.”

I listened intently. When he paused to push a fork full of fried eggs and potatoes into his mouth, I said, “I'm not making the connection.”

“That's because I haven't given it to you yet. I had a great senior year—first-team All-Ohio, Akron
Beacon-Journal
player of the year—and I accepted a scholarship to Ohio University. A bunch of schools offered me scholarships, including Pitt, and that's where my dad wanted me to go, but I was tired of living in his shadow. Everything was great until three days before my high school graduation when a federal grand jury indicted my dad on a host of felony counts of corruption in office—promoting prostitution, accepting kickbacks from gamblers and drug dealers, and money laundering. They had him dead to rights. The Feds had been watching him for years and had him on video taking kickbacks and payoffs. All of a sudden, the most popular man in the county gets exposed as the most corrupt. Here I am, ready to take on the world, make a name for myself, and every television news show is running video clips of my dad being led into the jail—his jail—with his hands cuffed behind his back. I hardly went out of the house that summer. I used to get in the car and drive for an hour until I found a vacant ball field or a park where people didn't know me so I could work out. All I could think about was how the guys on the team at O.U. were going to treat me when they found out my dad was the disgraced sheriff of Summit County.”

“So what happened?”

“My dad swallowed his service revolver two weeks before I reported to camp.”

I frowned.

“He committed suicide. Shot himself. I was devastated and didn't want to go to college, but my mom made me. She said everything a mom should say, that my life had to go on, that it wasn't my fault, that I needed to do what was best for me. But I couldn't get past it. I felt like I was reporting to football camp with a bull's-eye painted on my forehead. I got to Ohio University and not a single person on that team knew who I was, knew who my dad had been, or gave a rat's ass. There was another kid from Akron on the team and he never made the connection. Or, if he did, he didn't say anything. When someone asked me about my dad, I said he was dead and that always ended the conversation. In four years, I had one guy ask me how he died.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him that he died of a cerebral hemorrhage. That's not the point. You're all concerned about your name being Hickam. That was a hurdle you had to overcome at East Vinton High School. In college, it's just going to be your last name. You'll be the only one to determine if people view it in a positive or a negative way.”

We finished breakfast and headed to downtown Athens, a college town tucked deep into the Appalachian foothills. We parked on a side street three blocks from campus and walked to the Collegiate Corner men's store. The store was a shrine to Ohio University athletics. Football helmets, autographed basketballs, team photos, and baseball bats adorned the tops of the shelves. When we entered the store, you would have thought that Miss Singletary and I were walking in with a member of the royal family. There were a half-dozen men in the store and they immediately came walking up to Coach Battershell. “They love him down here,” Miss Singletary whispered.

“No doubt.”

When his well-wishers had backed away, Coach Battershell shook hands with a distinguished-looking man with salt-and-pepper hair, a crisp white shirt, and a cloth tape measure draped around his neck. “Hello, Kyle,” the man said, holding out a long hand. “Is this our boy?”

“Jimmy Lee, I want you to meet a good friend of mine, Mr. Tom Lynch. Mr. Lynch, this is Jimmy Lee Hickam.”

“Hickam, is it? Good to meet you, young man. Come on over here.”

On a rack in the corner was a navy blazer, five dress shirts— three white and two pale blue, two pair of khaki and two pair of gray slacks, and five neckties, mostly reds and yellows and one green and navy. He handed me a shirt and a pair of the gray slacks. “Try these on for me and let's see how close we are in size.”

I did. The shirt fit like it was made especially for me. Never in my life had anything felt as nice as those wool slacks. They needed to be hemmed and cinched in around the waist, but they were soft and comfortable. “What are these things?” I asked, pointing at the waves of material in the front of the slacks.

“Pleats,” Mr. Lynch said. “Never had pleats before?”

“I never had anything that fit like this.”

Mr. Lynch tugged and pulled and marked up the slacks with a piece of tailor's soap. We repeated the process with the other three pairs of pants. Then he fitted me with the navy blazer. I'm not a boastful person, but I will tell you that I never looked as good as I did with that navy blazer over a white shirt. As he was marking the back, I took a peek at the left sleeve and the hundred-thirty-five-dollar price tag. I looked over at Miss Singletary and silently mouthed, “I can't afford this.”